About Me

Welcome to my blog. My pen name is Eva James. I'm an aspiring writer paying the bills working as a legal secretary.
Relentlessly bullied by my former boss, I looked for another job but the recession hit. Feeling trapped, I recorded everything in this blog, which serves as a revealing insight into workplace bullying.
WEEK 1 starts the story and, as the weeks progress, you'll note what starts as banter soon spirals out of control. Sadly, it's all true. Whilst along the way I've found alternative employment, my passion for blogging about workplace bullying remains.
Trevor Griffiths, legendary theatre, TV and film writer said at the outset, "I like the writing a lot: smart, cool, placed. If you were prepared/able to take your prick of a boss on, you'd marmelise him."

Thursday, 29 October 2015

In
November, I’ll be going into a month of hibernation from social media as I’m
embarking on the NaNoWriMo writing challenge – 50,000 words of a novel in a
month. Ouch! Before I go (and I’ll be back in December), I wanted to reflect on
the legacy of former Work and Pension Secretary, Vince Cable, and look at the
potential future legacy of David Cameron.

V

ince Cable may be gone, but the process he began of moving power
away from the employee to employers continues.

I

n a previous blog, I wrote about the tribunal fees which were
introduced by Cable in the summer of 2013. Employees now have to pay up to
£1,200 to take their claim to the employment tribunal. Cable argued that this would
deter around 25 per cent of employees.

The drop in employees able to afford the tribunal route turned out
to be a lot bigger, closer to 80 per cent. For employers, this nut wasn’t just cracked, it was
oven roasted and then blitzed in a Tory food processor.

Employees
had one defence left, it seemed: union membership. Unions can help represent
you at tribunal and even help towards the cost of the tribunal fee. However, a
moderate amount of strikes involving London Underground, civil servants and
teachers has seen the government reaching for its sledgehammer again. The
sledgehammer has a name: The Trade Union Bill.

‘It is
about damaging the basic ability of working and middle class people to campaign
for good pay and employment rights...It will
hamper any future campaigns for a living wage, or against exploitative
contracts and discrimination. Basically any union campaign that can in any way
be judged as political will have its funding restricted by this law.’

Even
if you’re in a union, if the Tories win this battle, the only help you’ll get
in terms of employment is an official with their hands tied behind their back
and a pair of ears to listen to you.

I
sense there’s more behind this sledgehammer mentality. This isn’t the winter of
discontent of the 1970s, but with deeper austerity cuts on the way, perhaps the
tribunal fees and the Trade Union Bill are preparatory work. Perhaps the end
game is to try and ensure mass discontent is not given a voice in the coming
months and years. I’m pretty sure David Cameron doesn’t want his legacy to be a
winter of discontent. He may be underestimating anyway if the austerity measures get worse. His legacy looks more
likely to be the Four Seasons of discontent.